Neil Welliver was an American painter known for his large-format landscape paintings and woodcuts. Often depicting profound yet unassuming views of birches, streams, and evergreens in rural Maine. Affiliated from the 1950s onward with the American painters Alex Katz and Fairfield Porter, Welliver, like his peers, applied a methodology based in abstraction towards the translation of atmosphere and light into paint. Of his practice he said, “To imitate nature you need a tube of air or something and I don’t have a tube of air, so I found something that makes it look like there’s air in the color.” Born on July 22, 1929, in Millville, PA, Welliver studied at the Philadelphia College of Art before receiving his MFA from the Yale School of Art, where he studied color theory under Josef Albers. He went on to teach at Cooper Union, Yale University, and the University of Pennsylvania, while his own practice transitioned through abstraction to more expressive figurative works, before arriving at his mature style which are mostly landscapes. Welliver’s process included trekking into the forest to making plein air paintings even in the frigid Maine winters. He would then bring these studies back to his studio to create much larger compositions. Welliver died on April 5, 2005 in Belfast, ME. His works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.